Scholarship published in the criminologic, sociologic, and legal literature in the last 30 years show that the defensive uses of firearms by citizens amount to 2.5 million uses per year and dwarf the offensive gun uses by criminals

The 2.5 million figure would lead us to conclude that, in a serious crime, the victim is three to four times more likely than the offender to have and use a gun. Although the criminal determines when and where a crime occurs, although pro-gun advocates claim that criminals can always get guns, although few potential victims carry guns away from home, the criminal, according to Kleck’s survey, is usually outgunned by the individual he is trying to assault, burglarize, rob or rape. Kleck’s survey also included gun uses against animals and did not distinguish civilian uses from military of police uses. Kleck’s Interviewers do not appear to have questioned a random individual at a given telephone number, but rather asked to speak to the male head of the household. Males from the South and West were oversampled. The results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992..

In Professor Lott’s survey, children 14–15 years of age were found to be 14.5 times more likely to die from automobile injuries, 5 times more likely to die from drowning or fires and burns, and 3 times more likely to die from bicycle accidents than they are to die from gun accidents.[34]